Marion composed extensively throughout her youth, and this drew her to study music at University level. Her musical language can roughly be summed up as dissonance-yes, complexity-perhaps, atonality-no! During her Bachelor degree she composed the music for a film score and music for two Shakespeare plays, in addition to various assignments for electroacoustic modules and style composition.
As Director of Music at Exeter University she wrote music for various ensembles, including the 'International Songs of Sea & Water' for Orchestra&Choir, and a 3 -minute Fanfare for H.M. the Queen, performed on the occasion of the opening of the University Forum building.
Marion also made detailed sketches for an Opera that inverts the standard 'Heroines' operatic canon (which might roughly be summed up as: love despair, suicide) as a journey from despair to rebuilding after traumatic abuse - a sort of inverse Lucrezia. Due to work and family constraints this project remains in sketches, although its message is perhaps ever more pressing. The idea that music can be used to depict such tricky realities without overwhelming its audience: informing, calming and considering the possibility of healing, remains an important aim.
In 2013-14, considerably touched by her welcome to Germany from so many musical friends, Marion wrote 5 companion pieces for her short setting of Wilfred Owen's poem Move Him Into the Sun, to commemorate 100 years after the end of the first world war. Setting two more Wilfred Owen poems and then three matching poems by German poets who also died during WWI, the whole set are a testament to the paradoxes of war, and the hope of a lasting peace. This work has had several performances in different constellations, particularly as the outbreak of the Ukraine War made these considerations suddenly so much more relevant.
More on this, scores and recordings can be found here: